If I Close My Eyes Now

by Edney Silvestre

Filtered through childhood eyes, this story of incest, exploitation and corruption in high places is told in deceptively simple prose. The back story of Brazil as it lurches into the developing world permeates the whole book and provides a haunting back-drop to unlikely friendships in a time of innocence and hope.

Extract

Eduardo’s worries included a fear he had never known before: what if he had no future? The future that until that morning, in the headmaster’s office, he had taken for granted. What if in Brazil, in this new Brazil where industries, highways, jobs, were springing up all the time, what if in this new Brazil, even though, as their teachers taught them, it was a democracy, where we, the people, have free elections and can choose who is to govern us, what if in this Brazil there were powers, forces he could not describe or explain, or point to where they were lurking, what if they existed, those forces, those powers that could decide his destiny without him being able to do anything about it?